Why do I feel so trapped by my job and how do I get unstuck?

Right now it feels like your freedom is locked away until the situation changes, until the boss leaves, the workload eases, the job improves. When you believe that, you hand all your power to things you cannot control. No wonder it feels like a trap. You have put the key in someone else's pocket. Here is the shift. Your circumstances may be genuinely hard, and some of them you truly cannot change yet. But your freedom does not actually live in them. It lives in how you meet them, what you choose to do inside the constraints, what you refuse to let the job take from your character. That part was never locked. Start small and take back one thing. Choose one response today that is yours, not forced: how you speak to a difficult person, whether you keep your standards, what you do on your own time. You may still need to change your circumstances eventually. But you do not have to wait for them to change to stop feeling trapped.